Hooks — rules that fire without asking
Automatic tripwires, so the discipline is not left to your memory.
Not filmed yet
The lesson is written out below. The video comes after.
Every workflow has a step you know you should do and reliably do not. Take a snapshot before touching production. Update the changelog when a task closes. Run the checker after an edit.
You do it for a week. Then you are in a hurry, and you skip it, and nothing bad happens, so you skip it again. That is not a discipline failure — it is what happens to any rule that depends on somebody remembering it at the worst possible moment.
A hook removes the remembering. It fires on an event, every time, whether you thought about it or not: before this kind of change, run that. After this finishes, write that down. The rule stops living in your head and starts living in the system.
Which means the honest way to choose your hooks is to look at what you have already forgotten to do twice.
The one thing to keep
A rule you have to remember is not a rule. It is a hope.
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